


A Capella

by thingswithwings



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Chromatic Character, Gen, Music, Storytelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-03
Updated: 2007-12-03
Packaged: 2017-10-24 02:56:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/258146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingswithwings/pseuds/thingswithwings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But Teyla.  Teyla gets a record deal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Capella

**Author's Note:**

> The prompt was "Teyla, arts & crafts." I went instead with Teyla, [Arts and Crafts](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arts_&_Crafts_\(record_label\)).
> 
> The title is Italian, and its original meaning is "at the chapel."

  
After declassification, Rodney gets a Nobel, and John gets a few medals from the President, and Keller gets a research institution named after her, and Ronon gets largely ignored.

Teyla, though. Teyla gets a record deal.

-

The people willing to disseminate her music on Earth want many things from her: want her to tour the planet for months, to attend parties and meet with Earth celebrities, to sing for crowds as big as the populations of planets that she's known. She refuses; her life is, as always, in Pegasus, with her family, with her people, fighting.

But she does take a week or two, each year, to spend on Earth, and allows the music people to book her into ten or twelve concerts. By the end of the run, when she gets back to Atlantis, she is inevitably hoarse, sometimes sick, and quiet: no one on Atlantis noticed how vocal Teyla was until she started coming back from her tours tight-lipped and silent.

It's always the same, now: she walks out onto the stage, no opening act, no introduction. She carries the little set of pipes that she has had since she was a little girl; the good ones, the ones she uses for ritual.

She walks to the centre of the stage and stands at the front of the crowd. "Hello," she says, smiling at them. "I am Teyla Emmagan, daughter of Tagan, once of Athos, now of Atlantis."

They used to cheer at this part, but Teyla grimaced and spoke through their applause, every time. Now they stay silent.

She decides, this night, to begin with something traditional. "I will begin by telling you about a woman who was like a grandmother to me, who died of old age."

Teyla sings them the songs for her family: for Charin, dead with great honour at a time of great strife; for her father, culled so young. She sings the one for Jinto, which is fast and full of difficult rhymes, and the one for Halling, ponderous and earnest. She has a song for Elizabeth and Carson, and she has a song for Rodney, a song for Ronon, a song for John. She has a song for Aiden.

Then she moves to the history-songs: the fall of Rannuut, the forming of the great alliances, the battle at Umyn-Haw, the fall of Thebel. There are six songs that tell the history of Athos: Builders, Music-Makers, Mourners, Child-Bearers, Nomads. She sings the new songs she has made, too, the Atlantis-history songs, even though she doesn't yet know how they fit into the cycle.

The crowd – so many people; in Pegasus, a gathering like this would be nothing but a feast for the Wraith – does as is expected; it laughs over the funny songs and cries over the songs of mourning, and listens between the songs as she tells them that they are spoiled, that they are lucky, that they are soft.

It takes hours to go through an Athosian song-cycle, which is why it is typically only done once or twice in a year. Teyla does it nearly every night for two weeks, for an audience of people who have never heard the buzzing of the darts or seen the swift dark mist at the corners of the eyes.

When she has finished the song-cycle, she walks off the stage. They used to call for her to come back and sing again, but she never did, and so they stopped calling. When she has finished the song-cycle, she walks off the stage, and the crowd stands and walks out of the crowded amphitheatre.

-

"Hey," John says, his eyes crinkling at the edges in a way she sometimes sings about. "It's our local celebrity! How was the world tour?"

She has insisted that none of them come to see her concerts, though she has sung most of the songs for them at various times throughout their years together. She smiles at him, setting her bags down momentarily on the gateroom floor as the wormhole hisses shut behind her.

"It was fine," she says, and turns her eyes back to her home.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic of] A Capella](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10030736) by [exmanhater](https://archiveofourown.org/users/exmanhater/pseuds/exmanhater)




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